Scribner Seminar ProgramCourse Description

What's the Big Idea?

Instructor(s): Robert Boyers, English

Students in this seminar will examine the role—and the meaning –of ideas in the culture
of the last one hundred and fifty years. They will study a variety of essays, two
novels, two stories and three films focused on particular ideas and think about the
ways ideas are shaped, promoted, argued against, trivialized or distorted, observing
how an idea can seem compelling, or vicious, or dubious, or ridiculous, or inspiring
when presented in a polemical or analytic essay or in a work of fiction or film. Students
will pay close attention to questions of intention, audience, form, balance, fairness,
complexity and tone, and will think as well about what happens to ideas when they
become popular or influential in the life of a culture.

In examining a wide range of approaches to ideas, students will be asked throughout
to bear in mind the cautionary words of the poet T.S. Eliot, who said of the novelist
Henry James that “he had a mind so fine it could never be violated by ideas.” What
does it mean, we shall ask, to be violated by ideas? Why is it that many people who
whole-heartedly endorse the idea of “identity” then go on to simple-mindedly think
that their own identities are primarily defined by narrow endowments like race or
gender or sexual preference or nationality? Why should many, many minds be violated
when they become obsessed with what look like attractive ideas? The works studied
in this course will enable students to think clearly about such matters, and will
provoke heated discussion.

No formal “methodology” will be involved in the conduct of this seminar, which will
be marked by discussion, the steady, comfortable, sometimes heated exchanging of views
among people who will have a shared foundation in the texts studied but will bring
to those texts widely divergent backgrounds and assumptions. As in any meaningful
discussion focused on serious ideas, all participants will strive to identify, as
they proceed, the particular assumptions that figure in their own responses and to
adjust those assumptions, wherever possible or plausible, in light of their reading
and their interactions with other students in the seminar.